Monday, February 16, 2015

Franz Lehár’s 1905 Viennese operetta The Merry Widow has been filmed twice in
English, three times if you count Erich von Stroheim’s perverse and
entertaining silent version. But it isn’t revived very often on stage, so I anticipated
the version in the Metropolitan Opera season, which the Met offered as part of
its Live in HD series last month, with pleasure. This production
cross-pollinates the worlds of the opera and the musical theatre. It stars
opera diva Renée Fleming opposite Broadway leading lady Kelli O’Hara and Nathan
Gunn, an opera singer who sometimes appears in concert versions of musicals;
the new translation is by Jeremy Sams, who furnished the best translation of
Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Operathat
anyone has done to date; and the staging is by the explosively talented – and
prolific - director-choreographer Susan Stroman. But though this Merry Widow has its points, it turns out
to be something of a disappointment: tired and sagging in the middle, its fin-de-siècle exuberance strained, the
farce strenuously overplayed. I couldn’t tell whether Stroman, whose recent
stage work hasn’t garnered the enthusiastic reception she once drew, was trying
too hard or whether she just wasn’t a match for the frothy, high-comic style of
the material. I hope it’s the latter; I wouldn’t like to think that the
ungenerous response to her dazzlingly inventive work on Bullets Over Broadway –likely a ricochet effect from the way the
culture lashed out at Woody Allen around that time – has shaken her confidence.

As written (Viktor Léon and Leo Stein penned the
German libretto, an adaptation of a mid-nineteenth-century comedy by the French
playwright Henri Meilhac) the piece is thin but charming, with music that may
not rival the great comic operas but is the equal of a strong Broadway musical
score. The setting is Paris, where the embassy of the tiny, bankrupt Balkan
country Pontevedro is worried that its richest citizen, Hanna Glawari, the still-young
widow of the title (played by Fleming), may remain here with her fortune. Two
Frenchmen, the Vicomte Cascada (Jeff Mattsey) and Raoul de St. Brioche
(Alexander Lewis), are paying court to her, so the Ponteverdian ambassador
Baron Mirko Zeta (Sir Thomas Allen), instructs one of his countrymen, the
hedonistic military attaché Count Danilo Danilovitch (Gunn), to get her to marry
him. But he’s reluctant, because he and Hanna have a romantic history: he wooed
her once, but she was only a poor farmer’s daughter at the time and his uncle
forbade the match. In Ernst Lubitsch’s 1934 film, Maurice Chevalier, at his
most disarming, plays Danilo and Jeanette MacDonald, before her collaboration
with Nelson Eddy at M-G-M transformed her into the Iron Butterfly, is the widow
(called Sonia in the movie). The team that fashioned it, including screenwriters Samson Raphaelson and Ernest Vajda and Rodgers and Hart, who provided the new
lyrics, give it a most appealing moonstruck silliness. (The remake, with Lana
Turner and Fernando Lamas, shows up occasionally on TCM, but I’ve never been
tempted to tune in.) They also cut the operetta to about an hour and a half.
Obviously the Met has to stage it uncut, but it’s a tall order to sustain the
effervescence in three full acts, and the show feels overstuffed. Even Julian
Crouch’s sets, at least the first two, are a trifle glacéed. They come to life in
the third act, when he gets to evoke the celebrated club Maxim’s in Art Nouveau
style. The gifted lighting designer Paule Constable, whose work I’ve often
admired on the London stage, shares credit for the visual wit and splendor of
this act.

Kelli O’Hara and Renée Fleming (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The singing, unsurprisingly, is lovely, and any
opportunity to see Fleming in a soprano role she hasn’t previously sampled
justifies the effort. Swathed in a veritable assembly line of whipped-cream
gowns by William Ivey Long (my favorite is the creation with ornamented roseate
sleeves that she steps into for the second half of act two, after losing the
peasant outfit Hannah wears to commemorate “Pontevedro Night” at her Paris
villa), Fleming accentuates Hanna’s light-hearted ironies, refusing to take the
text too seriously while applying her usual mix of delicacy and robustness to
the Lehár music. The highlight of the evening – as, I think, it always should
be – is “Vilja,” near the top of the second act, which follows some Balkan-ish
dances and is meant to be a setting of an old Pontevedrian folk tale about the
courtship of a woodsman and a wood nymph. Fleming renders it with exquisite
clarity, treading playfully through the fairy-tale lyric until she reaches the
plaintive, doomed-romantic part of the story (which is in the Swan Lake-La Sylphide category). She and
Gunn sound fine together and they have a glancing sexual connection, though
he’s not so great at meeting the technical demands of the comedy; he tends to
mug instead. (Danilo shows up sloshed in act one; Gunn’s performance improves
considerably when he stops trying to play drunk.)

The
opera-trained O’Hara meets the requirements of her charming second-soprano
part, the baron’s wife Valencienne, who is dallying with a Frenchman, Camille
de Rosilion (Alek Shrader), behind her husband’s back. O’Hara and Shrader have
three enjoyable duets. This is a sweet role for O’Hara, though the Maxim’s
scene, where she dances with the “grisettes,” reminded me that, much as I love
watching her, whenever she plays rowdy, game dames (whether briefly, as here,
or in more extended ways, in The Pajama
Game and Nice Work If You Can Get It),
I always feel she’s transcending the miscasting. There’s no one to complain
about in the supporting cast except for the musical-theatre clown Carson Elrod
(Peter and the Starcatcher, All in the
Timing), whose performance as Njegus, the Baron’s aide, has a stock-company
familiarity. And despite the lack of inspiration in the production overall, I’m
glad to have seen it, for Fleming and O’Hara especially and in order to hear
the music conducted by Sir Andrew Davis and framed by expert voices. When the
orchestra strikes up “The Merry Widow Waltz” – even if you have first to banish
thoughts of Joseph Cotten as the “Merry Widow” murderer in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt – the effect is
tonic.

– Steve Vineberg
is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.